Competition is for losers
An argument against conventional schooling
I love education, but I hate schooling.
I don’t necessarily hate schooling for what it did to me, as I escaped it with minimal damage. In fact, in some ways, I benefited from schooling, but my benefit came at the expense of others. And that is one of the reasons why I hate schooling.
I come from a family where schooling is valued aspirationally, but accomplishment has always proven elusive. As of my senior year of high school, no one in my immediate family had graduated from high school, and to my knowledge no one in my extended family had ever attended college.
In part because my family did not care what type of grades I earned, I never cared much myself. I would study for tests in the hallway before class, but I was not going to burn myself out when I had more serious concerns such as wishing girls liked me or hoping that I’d become a starter on the football team. I wanted to do well at school, but not enough that it ever weighed on me.
When the topic of college came up, my dad told me that the only way I could afford to go was if I got a full ride. And because I did not have straight A’s, it felt like I was too late in the game to do that. However, at the end of my junior year a teacher informed me that federal service academies were free to attend (in exchange for a military commitment). I decided I would apply to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When I learned that I needed to be near the top of my class to have a shot at getting in, I suddenly became concerned about my class ranking.
For the first time I saw academic success as a competitive, relative measure. I could only do well if I left others, my classmates, behind. It would be many more years before I would fully realize that schooling is a sorting mechanism that provides access and opportunity to some, and denies it to most others.
The sorting mechanism of schooling is great if you win, like I did, I suppose. It is not so great if you got sorted out, like the rest of my family did, though.
In a competition, for every winner there has to be at least one loser. Without losers there can be no winners. But in the game of schooling, being a winner requires many losers. The quality of winning in schoolish pursuits is defined by the number of those who lost (e.g., valedictorian of a large class, admission into a college with a low admission rate). And while schools want to take credit for their winners, they don’t like to take credit for the losers.
“Competition is for losers” is a mantra of Peter Thiel, the complicated investor who could easily be the poster child for “The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point.” This mantra is central to his advice to entrepreneurs to seek out monopoly positions in his book Zero to One. Thiel argues that it is easier to be successful by avoiding competition than by trying to outcompete others. He writes, “All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” This logic applies to school-age people, as well.
The reality is that without schooling, the losers—each of whom is a human being who wants to lead a meaningful life—would not be labeled as losers. The competition of schooling takes brilliant people with unlimited potential and declares that they are inadequate, curtailing future opportunities, and leading too many of them to conclude that perhaps they really are losers.
Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition. Grades themselves allow precise measurement of each student's competitiveness; pupils with the highest marks receive status and credentials. We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don't learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior. (Peter Thiel, Zero to One)
And the winners are not immune from the consequences of competition—they are harmed, too.
Children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality.
And it gets worse as students ascend to higher levels of the tournament. Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. (Peter Thiel, Zero to One)
The good news is that schooling is optional, at least in the United States and select other countries. Through homeschooling, unschooling, or radical alternative learning communities, young people can opt out of the unnecessary and harmful competition of schooling much easier than an entrepreneur can opt out of a competitive marketplace. And one of the greatest benefits of opting out of the competition of schooling is how much space that opens up for education to happen.
Other writing:
In addition to this substack I plan to write elsewhere. Maybe multiple elsewheres. I don’t know what will stick, and everything will shake out in the end. Here I share an excerpt from an essay I had published in the book Trust Kids!
Unfortunately, the cloud of competition leads to a denial of self, as ways of being become scrutinized and used as inputs for placement within hierarchies. While families with sufficient material resources may find ways around it, children who are considered too far below or behind arbitrary behavioral or performance norms are often singled out and treated as defective. Children whose identities are not idealized by dominant society (e.g., Black, Indigenous, trans, undocumented, autistic) risk amplified marginalization.
The full essay “Changing the Context” can be found on the Abrome website
The book Trust Kids! that contains this essay can be purchased from AK Press (or Amazon)
Life lessons:
I left a high earning, high prestige post-MBA track about 13 years ago. My life then took a sideways turn 11 years ago when I was first arrested for calling out police abuse that I observed. I suddenly found that many of my relationships were situational and fragile. Many people who I thought I was close with severed contact with me over the issue of police abuse. So I’ve always appreciated those who stayed in touch.
One such person is Hugh, who I first met at West Point, and then got to know in Ranger School. His form of keeping in touch is running an NFL confidence pool each year. A confidence pool is where you rank NFL games (e.g., 1 to 16) by the likelihood that you think a team will win a given game. I took the pool fairly seriously the first several years, and even won the pool in years 3 and 4. But I stopped following NFL football a long time ago and now I just make quick, arbitrary guesses as a way to maintain contact.
Last week I won the weekly pool. This is not a brag, it is just an interesting observation. In games of chance, sometimes the least deserving get lucky and win. Proof of that is found in Hugh’s recap of my victory below.
Thank you to
and others for providing feedback on this essay.
Great post, Antonio. Most of the truly successful people I know are so because they focus on cooperation, not competition. They seek to help others and, as a consequence, they are valued by others and helped in return.
Cheers Antonio, great essay!